


Friend of the Devil

by Guede



Category: Devour (2005), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brother Feels, Car Sex, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Dom/sub Undertones, Guilt, Hand Jobs, Humiliation, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Non-Linear Narrative, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 08:15:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24467815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Sam meets up with a guy who has even more problems than him.  And well, they don’t do the Hallmark thing, but they do at least get rid of some tension.
Relationships: Jake Gray/Sam Winchester
Kudos: 6





	1. Friend of the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2006 for LJer alethialia. Set post-film and for SPN, post-"Devil's Trap;" probably diverges hugely from SPN canon as I stopped watching the show partway into season two. 
> 
> Both chapter titles are quoting Grateful Dead songs, if you were wondering.

Sam got out of the car, swung his rifle over the roof so he could brace it for the long shot he was about to take, and saw Dean running towards him, waving his arms and screaming.

The rifle almost clattered out of Sam’s slack hands.

This was almost to the Mexico-California border, Dean was supposed to be in Missouri, and for a moment, Sam thought he was having those damn nightmares again. Then Dean tripped--which never happened; his brother had as much tact as a moose, but he knew how to stay on his feet--and cleared the way for Sam to get a good look at the chupacabra he’d been tracking. Ugly, full of tusks, but the beady, glowing red eyes were great for lining up the right shot between them. Sam pulled the trigger, watched till the downed monster’s sides stopped heaving, and then ducked back in the car for the holy water and the clip of silver bullets.

By the time he walked around the car, fake-Dean had pulled himself into a sitting position and was alternating between dusting himself off and staring at the dead chucapabra the way a mesmerized rabbit would at a snake. He didn’t notice Sam till the last moment, when apparently reality hit and caught him in a spastic whirl. Sam squirted the holy water at that point.

Fake-Dean threw up his hands and twisted backwards in stages, sputtering and spitting. “What the hell--”

He wasn’t steaming, so that ruled out the possibility that it was a Dean who’d gotten possessed. On the other hand, shapeshifting didn’t have to involve demons, so Sam didn’t relax just yet. He hooked the bottle onto his belt and tucked the rifle beneath one arm so it was pointed at the ground, but could be easily swung up if need be. “Well, it’s pretty dusty out here. In the middle of the desert.”

“Yeah? I never would’ve guessed.” The guy wiped at his face till he could see again, then flipped his hands around to get them dry. He happened to glance towards the chupacabra as he did and he did a double-take, then froze. A lot of people would’ve been horrified and disbelieving, but his expression took it to a different level. “Oh, my God. Oh, God. Not again.”

He wasn’t talking to Sam, who was taking the opportunity to get a closer look. Actually, it wasn’t an identical likeness, though it was creepily close. This maybe would’ve been what Dean would have looked like if he’d been born within a year of Sam, and if he hadn’t spent most of his life getting whapped around like a wiffle ball in a ‘friendly’ neighborhood game. And if Dean didn’t have that weird, annoyingly infallible gift for shutting stuff off when it came time to sleep at night. The dark circles beneath this guy’s eyes looked like they’d been tattooed there.

The guy seemed to have forgotten Sam was there, because he suddenly burst into a mad backwards scramble, and equally as suddenly stopped when he ran into Sam’s feet. He let out a panicked gasp and whipped around, then jerked back and finally levered himself into a standing position. His wild eyes said he was about a hair away from running deeper into the scrublands. “Who are you? Who are you really? Beelzebub? My real father, whatever the hell you are--I know you’re not—”

Sam yanked the bottle off his belt-clip and gave the man another good shot of water. If it’d been cold, it might’ve worked better, but the force of it at least distracted the guy long enough for him to stumble again. He flailed and Sam had a time of grabbing one of his arms before the guy went completely over again; he yanked the man back upright, and then gave him a good shake. It seemed to work, since when he finally met Sam’s eyes again, he looked calmer. Slightly. His eyes were still wide with fear.

“What is that?” he asked. He said each word as if they were eggshells holding poisonous snakes.

“Chupacabra,” Sam replied. He got a blank look, which he thought meant the guy didn’t know what that meant. “It’s a legendary Mexican flesh-eating monster that mutilates animals. It--”

The man’s eyebrows drew together, and after a moment Sam realized it wasn’t so much that the guy couldn’t understand him—he’d been expecting Sam to say something...worse? He had the same look Dean sometimes got when he thought Sam was about to start off on Dad again, only to find out it was a complaint about something else. “Wait. You mean...that’s just some local boogeyman?”

“That almost ate you.” Sam let go of the guy and backed off, getting ready to call it in for the night. The man clearly had issues, but it didn’t seem like they were the kind that required silver bullets. “What’d you think it was?”

“Oh, some kind of demonic messenger from my mom.” The last word rode out on a crest of hysterical sarcasm. Once Sam had backed off, the man had wrapped his arms around himself and started furiously rubbing at his biceps, though it was close to ninety degrees out tonight. He stared helplessly around. “Man, where are we?”

Putting the holy water and weaponry away gave Sam a little time to compose himself. “How’d you get out here? It’s at least a mile to the nearest town.”

“I sleepwalk sometimes.” Long, shivering breath. “Well, I think I do. I’m Jake.”

“Sam. So...what does your mom do?” Okay, it was a lame way to pry for information, but Sam was finishing up a six-hour hunt. He was beat in, down, and out.

Jake shot him a sideways glance that was hunted and curiously assessing at the same time. “Possibly rules Hell. And please don’t think I’m being metaphorical, okay? I am so sick of trying to get that across to people.”

Sam just let that information sink in for a couple seconds, briefly wondering whether he’d stood down too quickly. Then he gritted his teeth and did what he probably should’ve done in the first place, only he hated calling on that part of him. He never was sure how far he could safely let it go, and he’d already had plenty of lessons in how bad it could get if he wasn’t careful.

The clouds overhead shifted, grazing over the full moon, and the shadows swept over Jake. Then he stepped out of them and slowly looked Sam over, going from shell-shocked to wary. His eyes flicked to the rifle Sam still was holding. “Nice. Is that the ‘97 model?”

“With some customizing, yeah,” Sam slowly replied.

“So you...uh...hunt monsters?” Jake began to rock on his feet. Towards Sam, towards desert, towards Sam...still in the grips of shock, apparently. It was starting to turn into the gallows perspective of war survivors, but not fast enough to stop Jake’s shivering.

It’d been a long night, and this was trouble Sam really didn’t end at the end of it, but he found himself shrugging anyway. “Yeah. Want a lift?”

* * *

“...uncle taught me. Started with rabbits and worked up to deer, sometimes bigger game.” A fond half-smile, the lightest thing Sam had seen on Jake’s face to date, quirked Jake’s lips in an eerily familiar way. Jake noticed Sam’s expression and went serious again, but not for the reasons he thought were running through Sam’s mind. “Ever hunt in Iowa?”

“A couple times. But not the kind of thing you brag about around a campfire,” Sam said, picking up his cup. The coffee around here was bad, and bad-spicy so it got all up in the nose about it, but it did the job. “So...”

The stark, harsh lighting of the diner did more to hide whatever Jake was thinking than the shadows had. He glanced to the side, propping one elbow up on the table so he could rub at the side of his face. His skin was tanned but waxy-textured, and grainy where the stubble broke through. “You keep looking at me weird. Are you trying to figure out if I’m something you need to kill?”

Sam put his coffee back down and pressed his hands around it for the warmth. The A/C in here was set on blizzard, so somehow he was in Mexico and in serious danger of catching a cold. Just a little highlight of the surrealism of it all. “I know you’re not.”

One eyebrow went up, and stayed up while Jake nervously slurped at his coffee. “So you’re the professional type? ‘I would’ve killed you in the desert, where I could’ve buried you easier’? That’s a relief.”

“You look a lot like my older brother,” Sam said, just a hair shy of snapping.

“Oh.” Jake closed down again, which probably didn’t mean he’d relaxed enough to lose the hysteria that bubbled under everything he did. His eyes went to the table, and he started making the wet rings from their untouched glasses of water into squares.

The weirdest part, Sam decided, wasn’t actually how alike the two were, or even really how different they were. It was how different the meanings of a similar-looking tic in the cheek, or curl of a lip, were between the two.

“Family problems?” Jake finally offered.

“Not...really. We work together most of the time, and I’m actually meeting up with him in another two weeks. It’s just—” _sometimes I can’t stand to look at him_ “--sometimes I need to go off, have some private time.”

Another long pause settled in. Sam checked on the lone waitress in the place, but she was still solidly planted in front of her milk-carton-size TV. She had Spanish soaps on.

“I started having these nightmares about six years ago. When I was awake, I think, so technically they were daydreams, but they were too...yeah. Then I started getting them when I was sleeping, so now I don't really sleep anymore.” Jake pulled over the coffeepot the waitress had thunked down for them and topped up his mug. He absently dosed it with enough sugar and cream to kill the Easter Bunny, then _drank_ it, which lent a lot of support to that statement. “But you have to eventually, and when I do, I sleepwalk. I walk all over the damn place...I’ve walked into more than one swimming pool.”

“Why’d you start having them at night?” Sam asked. He pulled an expressionless face to Jake’s sharp look.

It took three more swallows before Jake answered. On the third swallow, he got with things long enough to actually taste the coffee and choked a little. Grimacing, he dumped it into the trashcan behind their booth and started making up a new cup. “Well, my mom thought it was time for me to phone home, or something.”

He paused, then gathered himself and told the story in a low, too-steady monotone. Some demon had settled in his hometown and driven his friends to commit gruesome murder-suicides, killed his uncle and his parents...except according to it, they weren’t his family. He was actually the son of the Devil, and he’d been stolen away while she’d still been recovering from the labor of delivery. She’d finally come back for him and offered to make him a demon, but he’d refused and as a result, she’d framed him for all the murders.

“Or I’m just plain nuts,” Jake finished, draining his cup. He set it down and tucked his chin in towards his chest, then abruptly slumped backwards. “I don’t know. They came back to me in jail a week later and said we can’t prove it. Apparently there’s some videotape showing me staggering around in a parking lot at the time when the coroner says my parents and Maris--that girl were killed. Party line’s that I stumbled over the bodies, and just lost it. Drank blood, did the wildman thing, passed out...”

“So they didn’t blame you?”

“So they couldn’t _prove_ they could blame me. They still did. I got out of jail and got the hell out of town, because otherwise there would’ve been one more body to add to the list.” Jake shrugged and toyed with his stirrer, flicking coffee all over the countertop. “I probably should’ve stayed. It’s just--you know, maybe I didn’t do it for real, but it still all happened because of me. Except you can’t really know, can you? It’s not like problems usually come with that high a body count.”

Sam chewed on his lip, then ducked and coughed once. Laughter wouldn’t be that appropriate, but God, it was hard not to. “You’d be surprised.”

Snorting, Jake shifted around again so his foot accidentally whacked Sam’s shin. He mumbled an apology and prodded at the bottom of his mug with his stirrer. The plastic twig bent and he made a face. “Too much sugar again. You know what I’m surprised about? I’m surprised I’m sitting here, and I’m telling you about my dead family, and you’re telling me there’s actually so many monsters in the world that there are guys who drive around killing them. Do you get paid?”

“Not for _that_ job.” The coffeepot only had about a cup’s worth left in it, and the waitress looked like she’d need a backhoe to get her out from her niche at the end of the lunch counter. With a sigh, Sam shoved the pot over to Jake. “Has anything odd happened to you since then?”

“Well, did I mention my nightmares?” Jake dryly replied. “No, no, I get what you mean. No, actually. Nothing to back up my little spaz attack in the desert, and I think that’s worse. If something did show up, at least I’d know I’m not crazy.” He grinned humorlessly. “I’d be fucked up shit creek, but I wouldn’t be crazy.”

There was an inch of coffee left in Sam’s cup. He’d had about two before...that wasn’t going to be enough to get him on the road. It looked like he’d be staying over in this town anyway. “You’re not crazy. You’re no demon either, but you’ve run into one. What town did you say this happened in again?”

Jake glanced at him, then pulled himself up and put his arms on the table so he could properly stare Sam down. Except he was tired, and whenever his concentration let up the tiniest bit, his eyelids started fluttering shut. “How do you know? Is there some kind of demon-radar?”

What time was it in Missouri? Sam wondered. Right here it was somewhere between gray fatigue and the washed-out shades of hallucination. “There was this demon that went after my family. Not for the same reason as with you--”

“So I’m marked by life? I just scream ‘demon victim’ or something?” Jake snapped. He was getting over-excited again. It was a wonder he had the energy for it, if he was as sleep-deprived as he said he was.

“So the upshot’s that it wanted me because apparently I have these David Copperfield powers, and that includes being able to know things I really shouldn’t know about.” Sam dropped his head in his hands and ground at his eyes with the heels of them, trying to wake himself up for a little longer. He still had to drive back to his room. “Are you looking outside?”

Jake made a funny little croaking noise. “...your car’s floating.”

“Great, now I can put it down.” A little too hard so they could hear the thump from where they were. It made Sam wince, but mostly because he needed his car to keep going, not because he shared that weird obsession of Dean’s. Sam had kind of been hoping it’d just been the Impala, but no, once Dean had gotten another car it’d been just the same. “You’re not a demon. You’re not crazy. Though I can understand if now you wish I hadn’t told you that.”

There was a clock somewhere in the diner. It had an annoying tick, which Sam hadn’t noticed before but which was thunderingly loud in the long silence that followed.

“Why did you tell me?” Jake finally asked.

Sam didn’t quite muffle his chuckle in his fist. He raised his head and leaned back--slowly, since he was getting a headache. He hoped he wasn’t out of aspirin again, since no stores would be open at this hour. “Because that’s what we do. We help people,” he muttered.

“You sound real enthusiastic about it,” Jake observed.

After a moment, Sam just got up and threw a couple bills on the counter. He had the feeling he was leaving too much, but he didn’t care enough to glance back and check. “You’re welcome.”

“Aw, shit...hey. Hey, wait a--Sam! Wait!”

Jake caught up with him in the parking lot. He grabbed Sam’s arm and spun him around with more force than Sam had been expecting, given how Jake’s reflexes had looked like earlier.

“Sam...” Jake needed to catch his breath, though it’d been less than ten yards “...look, I was an asshole back there. Sorry. That’s the longest conversation I’ve had in nine months.”

“Should’ve met you nine months ago, then?” Sam shook himself free and flipped out his keys.

The jingle of them almost covered up Jake’s long exhale, which was interesting since Sam would’ve figured a bitter laugh would be more likely. “No, probably not. I was an asshole back then, too. If I hadn’t been, maybe she wouldn’t have been able to get to me and all the others.”

As hard as things were, as much as had happened to Sam, he still was surprised when something like that made him wince. He stopped with the key halfway in the lock, then turned around. “Where are you staying?”

Jake blinked, then gazed around as if he were only just now noticing the landscape. He shuffled his right foot around, raising dust clouds that puffed up to knee-height. Then he abruptly looked hard and clear at Sam again. “What happened with the demon after you?”

“It’s dead and it’s never coming back. Never,” Sam said. And with real, hard-earned relish. Maybe it tasted gritty beneath, but it mostly was something he savored.

“What happened to your family? I mean, I know your brother made it...or just tell me I’m an asshole again.” Jake tried to shrug nonchalantly, but he came off more like he was in the beginning stages of an epileptic fit.

Sam didn’t feel like having that much of an Oprah moment, but he didn’t feel like slinging around names, either. He sighed and jangled his keys around. “Where are you from?”

The question made Jake recoil slightly. Then his jaw clenched and anger briefly gave his face some color. “Well, yeah, thank you. Thank you for making me your fucking charity case.”

“They’re all fucking charity cases,” Sam snapped, grabbing the door-handle. He yanked before he remembered he hadn’t yet unlocked it. Spitting out a couple more swear-words, he jammed the key in and jerked it around, then pulled open the door.

“ _Shit_. Sam--”

Sam slid into the front seat and slammed the door before Jake could get at it. He shoved the key into the ignition, hesitated, and then pulled it back out. Then he opened the door and looked at Jake. “Where’s your motel?” he sighed.

Jake stared for a while. Eventually he walked around the car and got in the other side. “It wouldn’t do any good to go back there.” He didn’t mean the motel. “The demon’s following me, right? I’ve been running around hiding for a year now, trying to make sure nobody else gets killed because of me.”

“Yeah...yeah.” Of course. Jesus, Sam needed to go to sleep. He didn’t know how to think anymore.

“Hey. You’ve killed one before, so you’d know what—you’re the most human contact I’ve had in months. I don’t want...” Head ducked, Jake peered out the window. His feet were scuffing up the floor. “Never mind. I can walk it.”

“Do you even know what direction to go?” Sam asked.

Jake mustered up enough energy to look vaguely annoyed. “Look, I’m really fucking tired right now, okay? Could you lay off for a sec—”

Sam had grabbed his chin, but by the time they broke apart, Jake had him by the shoulder and arm. Jake started to talk, ran out of breath and licked his lips. Then he just sort of lunged at Sam, knee banging the stick-shift as he pressed over Sam’s lap. His tongue smacked up against Sam’s teeth, then twisted to shove in. Way too fast. Sam got his other arm around Jake, hooked fingers into Jake’s collar and tried to pull him back, force it slower by putting distance between them, but his own hips kept sliding forward, undermining his efforts. Jake’s tongue slid up the inside of Sam’s left cheek, then flicked out as the other man sucked on Sam’s lower lip, moaning. Sam froze.

A couple moments later, Jake got it and slipped back. “What?”

“You--you look _way_ too much like Dean. My brother,” Sam clarified.

“That’s the problem?” Jake said, breathless and disappointed at the same time. He had his fingers digging into Sam like they were trying to burrow out chunks.

Sam made himself think about it. “No, not really. And _that’s_ pretty damn disturbing.”

“Nobody’s dead yet,” Jake spat out. Dark and angry, but the way he moved up and sucked at the side of Sam's mouth was just pleading.

It was hot, too. Hot like Sam hadn’t managed to inoculate himself against, even with three days of working around this place. Hot like it curled down in his chest and made his muscles tighten; his knees rose almost by themselves and that edged Jake further against him, shoved Jake’s mouth right into Sam's and for one second Sam said fuck it.

Then he jerked back, and pushed up his arm between them when Jake tried to follow. “What happened to worrying about whether you’d get me killed by proximity?”

“Bullshit. If you can ‘know’ I’m not a demon, then you can know when to worry about that. What? You don’t like guys? You sure as hell like this,” Jake snarled. His nails scrabbled, trying to pull Sam back. “Goddamn it, what? What? What the hell did you manage to do that I couldn’t do? How’d you do it? How—”

Sam blocked Jake’s punch, then let Jake’s arm slide through his grip till he hit Jake’s wrist. And that he twisted up and behind the other man till Jake shut his idiotic mouth. “Did what? Yeah, Dean’s alive. Alive and missing an eye and with a back so fucked-up it should belong to an eighty-year-old. And everyone else I loved is dead, so what’d I do? _Stop asking._ ”

He shoved Jake across the seat, then dragged himself back and turned himself around to properly face forward. After a deep breath, Sam reached for the keys. They weren’t in the ignition any more, so he dug around on the floor for them, put them back in, and started up the car.

Jake exhaled once and slumped down, staring out the window. He didn’t make any sounds after that, and after Sam had reeled in his temper, he couldn’t blame him. So much for a civil discussion—now there were so many issues flying around that Sam was afraid he was going to start absorbing Jake’s by osmosis, and vice versa.

When they pulled into the lot of Sam’s motel, he finally gave up on Jake saying anything. “What?”

Jake had slumped against the door, resting his head against the window. His eyes had been closed, but now they opened to look wearily at Sam. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I see too much that way.”

Sam parked the car and stared out at the door to his room. It was cheap wood and the grain could be seen in patches where the lurid orange paint had peeled off. Didn’t look all that restful. He still couldn't help thinking of Dean’s scars when he looked at it. He couldn’t help thinking that if Jake had gotten anything from his ranting earlier, then that was that much less weighing down his shoulders. Selfish, of course. But hey, he was the selfish brother, wasn’t he? “Yeah, I know.”

He got out of the car. Got what gear he needed to, locked up, went into the room and arranged his stuff. Then he pushed past Jake, who’d followed him in, and shut the door. Locked that, dropped the keys on the table, grabbed Jake and shoved him up against the door.

“You act like you’ve got some checklist inside your head,” Jake panted. His right foot repeatedly scraped up and down the side of Sam’s calf, and his fingers gouged Sam’s shoulders. Occasionally they slipped over a nerve so streaks of numbness shot down Sam's arms.

Then they moved on, and the feeling came back savagely: burning, jagged bursts of pain that told Sam how dead-tired he was, and how pissed off he was, and how much he just couldn’t care beneath that. He laid into Jake’s neck, pressing his teeth up to feel the other man swallow raggedly, and banged Jake’s hips back into the door.

Jake hissed, swore. Twisted so his erection snugged up against Sam’s inseam and ground against Sam with a strangely skilled fluidity. One year since he'd gone running from his home. Sam idly wondered what kind of hustling Jake had had to do to keep moving.

He tasted of dust and layers of sweat--so many layers that they were almost flaking up under the pressure of his teeth. Beneath them, Jake’s pulse was jumping unevenly, like a lamed but terrified rabbit. Sam dragged his palm over Jake’s front, starting at the left shoulder with fingers pointed right and going in a long, long dive that ended with Jake’s knees ramming up against Sam’s in the hurry to spread wider. He let Sam slip fingertips beneath his waistband, follow the wrinkled, dirt-stiff cotton of his shirt till Sam just touched where it turned into bare skin, and then he shook like he’d been shocked. Grabbed Sam’s hand out of his jeans and ripped open Sam’s fly almost in the same motion.

He muttered something about sharp teeth--nicked himself on the zipper, maybe, or maybe he was talking about Sam chewing up his neck--but wasted no time in working out Sam’s dick and working it firmly between his fingers. They were rougher and harder than Sam had been expected, the calluses broken up by uneven scars, and Sam’s body from hips downward jerked forward before he could catch himself. Jake dealt with the extra pressure by edging up the wall till it was easier for Sam to suck on the underside of his jaw than on the shell of his ear. Harder to carry on a conversation that way, but that was probably for the better.

“You’ve got a laptop?” Jake suddenly asked, voice trembling. He’d gotten high enough to see over Sam’s shoulder into the rest of the room. His fingers didn’t stop, but they lost their rhythm, went maddeningly random. He started to nervously squeeze Sam's shoulder with his free hand. “Ever play any RPGs?”

“No.” Sam got his hand back between them, just touching the button of Jake’s fly with his two longest fingers. He got it trapped between them, but then flipped it the wrong way when Jake abruptly slid his hand down to cradle Sam’s balls.

“Nobody called you saying to do this?” Jake persisted.

That made Sam pause, and precariously balanced as they were, that almost made it all fall apart. But when Jake slipped down that inch, the side of his fly turned outwards instead of in, fabric scraping behind Sam's knuckles. Sam shouldered forward and rubbed his hand down Jake's prick, pressing it over the denim bunching up around the crease of Jake’s thigh. It slowed whatever Jake had been about to say so that Sam could catch the ragged words on Jake’s teeth, bite them off and taste stale panic.

“There’s a little voice in my head saying _not_ to do this,” Sam muttered. Issues, hell. They could be the ones sitting on the porch and waiting for the monsters, for once in his life.

“Just checking.” Jake sounded like he’d gotten his laugh and his gasp all crossed up. He suddenly gave, sinking backwards and letting Sam shove where he wanted, grind where he wanted, suck where he wanted.

His breathing grew harsher, and he moaned maybe once, but that was it. No screaming, no wild torrent of words--just a convulsive grasp and a choked-off noise rubbed into the crook of Sam’s neck by chapped lips. Sam shoved at him, and Jake tightened his hand back up on Sam’s cock.

He knocked his head back, stared fuzzily up at Sam when they were done, and he didn’t look like Dean at all. Not as Dean looked now, when every other second Sam was reminded of what he hadn’t managed to save. Not even really like Dean before, when Sam hadn’t quite known just how much he’d brought down on his family, but he’d known enough to try and break away. Of course, he’d been thinking that was the right thing to do for all the wrong reasons.

“It’s okay,” Jake said. He offered up a sick sort of ghost-smile. “I made out with the De--my mom before I knew who she really was. And then afterward, I still kind of wanted to. It just—wasn’t really because I wanted to fuck her.”

“I don’t want to screw my brother,” Sam replied. He was mildly annoyed at the disbelieving expression on Jake’s face. “It’s not like that. It just—might look like that way…”

Jake rolled his eyes. “That’s what I just said.”

Sam reviewed the last exchange they’d had, then shook his head, laughing to himself. “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m too sleepy now.”

Jake hesitated, then stared expressionlessly over Sam’s shoulder. He didn’t clutch, but he left his fingers curled how they’d been so Sam had to do the pulling away.

“You should lie down, too,” Sam slowly added. “At least for a while. It’s not gonna show. I’ve got salt everywhere, and some other barriers up.”

The other man still wasn't looking at him. He was staring at the coffee-maker, the one perk this lousy motel had, sitting in the corner. “I’m gonna borrow your coffee.”

“Suit yourself.” Sam hitched up his pants with one hand and swiped off as much come as he could reach with the other. He figured it was about time to trash this pair anyway; it still smelled like the Skunk Apes down in the Everglades.

* * *

Once upon a time, Sam had been able to sleep for eight straight hours. Now he was too used to getting smaller chunks that even when he had the time, when he was beaten to shit and back, he couldn’t go longer than two hours.

His head still hurt, and his mouth tasted like cotton soaked in sewage. With some vague thoughts about a glass of water in his mind, Sam threw out one arm and hooked it over the headboard. He used it to pull himself up, dislodging something lying over his side as he did.

It looked like sleep had sneaked up on Jake with a lead pipe: he was sprawled over the other side of the bed with his clothes still on and all straightened up, and when Sam checked, there was a coffee mug on the floor. Jake’s hand dangled off the bed right over it; luckily, he’d finished before he’d collapsed, so at least the room didn’t reek of shitty java. Just smelled like desperate, awkward sex.

Sam sighed and was getting up when his cell phone rang. He took a second to recall where it was, then scooped it off the bedside table and checked the Caller-Id. Shit. After another moment’s hesitation, he answered it. “Dean. It’s four in the morning.”

*Sorry, man. It’s nearly six here. Rise and shine time for me.* Pots and pans were clattering around in the background, along with a whistling kettle. Someone else was cooking, since a series of low clicks said that Dean was cleaning guns. *How’d the crazy pig hunt go?*

“Fine. And chupacabras aren’t pigs,” Sam muttered. Jake stirred when Sam leaned over him, but just long enough to roll onto his side, facing the wall. His hands were curled into white-knuckled fists, Sam idly noted.

After picking the mug up off the floor, Sam went into the bathroom and gave it a half-decent rinse. Only cup in the room.

*All wrapped up?*

About a third of a pot was left. A couple flies had gotten in, probably through the banged-up bathroom window screen, and were buzzing around, but Sam figured they’d probably have improved the taste if they had gotten into the coffee. He poured himself half a cup. “Pretty much.”

Dean exhaled in exasperation. *So are you coming back now?*

“I thought we agreed on Washington in two weeks.” Sam’s feet hurt, in that maddening, dully swollen way that wasn’t quite agony, but that could rub nerves even rawer. He sat down on the end of the bed and watched Jake’s feet restlessly move, twitching up and down in a slow-motion run. “Bobby’s not getting on your nerves already, is he?”

*Only whenever I want to kill something,* Dean snorted, voice rich with sarcasm. *You’d think I’d lost a hand or something. I just have a hell of a backache once in a while.*

More like every moment of every day, to the point where Sam was mildly fearful of a painkiller addiction developing. Dean let Sam do most of the interviewing now, since witnesses invariably thought he was angry or psychotic or both from the way he gritted his teeth.

*Sam,* Dean sighed. He let it go for another ten, twenty seconds. *What the hell are you doing?*

“Taking a vacation. Besides, you needed Bobby to handle the woodwitch and you know we don’t exactly get along.” Just as Sam had raised the mug to his lips, the coffee slopped up to almost overrun the rim. He lowered the cup, then looked over at a waking Jake.

The other man rolled back over and kind of doubled in on himself at the same time. He groaned, then jerked up in a short burst of terror that didn’t end right when he saw Sam, or when he could understand that what he was looking at was Sam. He did try to smile; it wavered like the hinges at the corners had been knocked loose. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

*You’ve got someone there with you,* Dean said. He sucked in his breath, then continued in a suspicious tone. *Is that a guy?*

“He had a run-in with the chupacabra.” Sam waved for Jake to go into the bathroom, since Dean had developed extremely acute hearing...right around the first time Sam had had to take off on a lone hunting trip. But the coffee splashed again, and this time it did get all over Sam’s hand. He cursed and went to put the cup down, only of course there was nothing around on which to put it.

Jake grabbed the cup. He gave Sam an odd, long look before getting off the bed. The bathroom light went on, and a couple seconds later he was back with a wad of toilet paper, which Sam took with a nod of thanks.

Dean, meanwhile, started and cut off several transparent attempts to question Sam’s sanity. He paused once to snap at Bobby’s rusty rasp in the background, and finally just stopped altogether. Breathed in again. The next try, he sounded more collected. Not any less pissed off, but like he was going to be coherent about it, at least. *He’s not a werewolf, is he?*

“That only happened once and I told you, I didn’t know beforehand.” The cheap paper went to pieces as soon as it got wet, leaving Sam to try and scrub the little disgusting flecks of white off his knuckles. He looked up at the scraping sound, but it was just Jake shoving over the trashcan with his foot. “It’s a vacation. I’m loosening up, just like you’re always after me to do.”

Jake went still and his eyebrows rose.

*Sam, goddamn it, we _lived_ \--*

“I’ll see you in two weeks,” Sam finished. He didn’t just hang up; he turned off the damn cell phone. And then he sat back and stared across the room, wondering how the hell he’d be ready to face Dean in that short a time.

A couple of thumps in front of him got his attention: Jake kicking the trashcan back over to the wall. Sam thought about coming up with some dumbass excuse for the part of the conversation Jake had heard, but decided that would be worse. He hadn’t exactly made a considerate first impression on Jake anyway, and a severe allergy to fake-outs seemed to be something Jake shared in common with him.

When Sam tossed the wad of coffee-soaked paper into the trashcan, Jake just stepped out of the way to let it go by. He stayed where he was while Sam got the laptop over to the bed and set it up; he could see the screen from that angle, so maybe that was it. He wanted to get something concrete before he threw his next fit and hit Sam or whatever and stormed out.

“But I told you,” Jake suddenly said. “The demon’s not going to be there anymore.”

The screen didn’t focus enough to tell Sam anything the first time Sam blinked, so he did it again. It’d be nice if he could refresh the rest of himself so easily. It’d be nice if it wasn’t so creepy that he could start a background search without even knowing he was doing it. “It still sounds like it left a hell of a trail. No offense, but I kind of doubt it was the devil—demons always exaggerate. Taking a look at what it did would help with figuring out who it really is.”

Jake took a hesitant, sideways step closer to Sam. His shadow fell over the keyboard and briefly morphed into something with giant horns sticking out from either side of his head. “I wouldn’t have thought anywhere in this town had the Internet.”

“I hacked the phone line. It’s incredibly slow, but it works.” Sam tapped a few keys, starting a worm that’d burrow into the Cheever Lake police files and deliver the relevant info to one of his email accounts. He’d done it so many times now that he could do it without looking at his fingers, which left him to stare at Jake’s shadow.

It wavered, then went back to human. When Sam turned around, the skin around Jake’s temples wasn’t tight and pink and shiny, and it wasn’t wrinkled and grayish, like it should’ve been if he really had grown horns. Jake just looked like a worn-out guy Sam’s age, who was desperately trying to suppress a hopeful look with wariness. “Why?” he asked.

“Hate to break it to you, but demons aren’t totally exclusive. It might have an obsession with you, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t go off and mess with other people when it’s not bothering you,” Sam said. The connection fritzed in the middle of another set-up and he cursed, trying to shut it down without leaving messy footprints all over.

Jake walked around Sam to check out the customized modem. He squatted down and carefully lifted it with a finger, then whistled. The side of his mouth that Sam could see quirked up. “I used to do this kind of thing. Though I never really had the balls to use it once I knew that it worked.”

Sam had finally extracted himself from the database when something bumped into the inside side of his right calf. He absently leaned his leg away from it, only to have the laptop suddenly rise about six inches, with Jake’s hands and head briefly visible under it. The laptop took a sharp tilt, then almost slid off Sam’s lap and he made a wild grab for it just as Jake pressed his face into Sam’s crotch. _Jesus_.

Laptop. A mad scramble saw it onto the bed beside Sam, but the wires had all tangled around Sam’s right hand and Jake had just run his tongue over Sam’s zipper. The denim of Sam’s jeans might as well have been tissue-paper, because Sam _felt_ the wet heat and his knees went to loose jelly and the back of his throat seized up in a burning knot. He reflexively jerked at his right hand and nearly sent the damn laptop off again.

Jake flicked his eyes up and they were a molten, rippling green so deep that for a couple moments Sam completely missed the chaotic quality of the rippling. He had his hands on Sam’s knees now, and his lips were shaped around the button of Sam’s fly, pushing and pulling. Awkwardly, Sam dimly realized, but the awkwardness pretty much got glazed over by the friction Jake’s chin, digging into Sam’s crotch and rubbing, was setting up; this had been a gre—lousy time for Sam to decide he’d just go without and do the laundry once he’d gotten back to civilization.

Eventually Sam remembered he had a left hand, too. He started to grab for Jake’s head, but detoured just as Jake over-reacted away and almost knocked into the dangling cables. Sam got a handful of blanket and pulled himself further up onto the bed, drawing his knees together. He felt like a girl in a 1940s movie. “Like I said, we do this for _free_.”

Or maybe he was supposed to be the playboy with the nasty attitude. First Jake settled back on his arms, staring disbelievingly at Sam, and then he looked like he wished he’d taken his mom’s offer. “You’re a fucking prick, you know that?”

“I’m not the one who just tried to go all Tijuana backstreets—”

“Look, I might be devilspawn, but I haven’t had to go that low,” Jake snapped. He held the outrage for about ten seconds before it abruptly dissolved into black irony. He turned his head sideways and let out a coughing laugh. “Shit. I just figured if I was going to be your vacation, I m—I haven’t, really. Just your typical drunken college experimenting.”

Sam could feel the beginning of a headache throbbing in the bones of his eye-sockets, low and heavy. He chewed on his lip as he untangled his right hand, then reached over to turn off the laptop. “Frats?”

“Never joined ‘em, but you could say I knew enough of them to get invited to the parties.” Jake slowly pushed himself up and folded his arms over his legs. He sighed, staring up at Sam. “So what is this, exactly? It doesn’t look like I’m any good at guessing.”

The simplest answer would be a bad idea. “I have two weeks left,” Sam said, measuring out each word. “I could offer to see if I can do anything about your demon.”

“You make it sound like going back to your brother’s a big pain.” From the way Jake snorted, he’d seen Sam twitch or something at that. He shrugged and reached out for the end-table, then pulled himself to his feet. Then he gave Sam a look that could’ve doubled as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Why’d you push me up against that door and give me one hell of a handjob?”

Obviously, the clever and curt replies that reflexively sprang to mind weren’t going to work, so Sam thought. And thought, and thought, till it was clear even to him that he was stalling.

Oddly enough, Jake didn’t seemed annoyed. Just resigned and hurting, like an animal that wasn’t necessarily wounded to the point of death, but that just couldn’t muster up the fight to get back up. “Well, I know why I let you push me,” he said. “Funny feeling, actually knowing something for once…anyway.” He shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I wanted somebody screwing me who didn’t care about _how_ it was screwing me over.”

Then Jake stood there, and Sam sat, and the red light of dawn bled into the room around them. It was like standing inside a slashed heart.

“Do you want help?” Sam finally asked.

“No,” Jake immediately replied. Then he jerked his head in negation and rubbed at his eyes; he hadn’t gotten that caught up on his sleep. “I mean…like you said, it’s _my_ demon. I hate this running…it might be a nice vacation, but it’s a hell of a lifestyle. All that stuff, it all happened because of me, so I should take care of it. I owe it to my friends and family.” He worked up a ghost of a smile. “But, you know, suggestions on how to do that would be handy.”

Dean never would have asked that question. It probably never even passed through his mind…even when he’d been dying, Sam remembered with a rueful half-smile. He wasn’t dying now, but Sam had been thinking it had to be so much worse, and after all that he himself had caused and done, what could he possibly do now for Dean?

Actually, he wasn’t exactly qualified to answer that question.

“I can point you in the right direction. Can you get out of town?” Sam hoped that didn’t come off as too condescending.

It probably had, but Jake just pushed it off with a slight arch of one eyebrow. “Yeah. I…keep getting good luck at the worst times. Guess she still has hope for me.”

“I should take you back to your place,” Sam said after a moment.

Something flickered out in Jake’s eyes then, though overall he was lighter, face less strained and carrying himself straighter. He lifted and dropped one shoulder. “Thanks.”

* * *

Jake had been renting a room above the local grocery store, which had a private lot in back for truck deliveries. High walls on either side of it meant Sam could park without having to deal with the usual stares and shouting kids that his big, badass American car—last time he was letting Dean pick out one for him; “inconspicuous” wasn’t anywhere in Dean’s vocabulary—drew.

“It’s also Sunday morning. Everyone’s at church,” Jake said, letting Sam know he’d been talking his thoughts.

“Oh, yeah.” Sam leaned against his car and stared up at the sky, testing how bad the glaring sunshine was going to get to him. His eyes burned, but it was a low smolder, enough to counteract the fatigue without becoming too much of a problem. If he was careful. “Listen, I mean it about calling me. This isn’t like Conan the Barbarian—if it looks like it’s too much for you to handle, then it is, and it will rip out your guts.”

“That’s really encouraging.” But Jake looked marginally calmer. He’d been all right when Sam had checked out of his room, but since then he’d been getting more and more jittery. Tapping his fingers and jiggling his foot, and asking his few questions in a tone that had a terrified under-vibration to it.

And he kept dancing towards and away from Sam, which worked on Sam’s nerves too, since he was never sure whether Jake was finally going to haul off and try to punch him, or just run. That was a problem because then he had to think about whether he’d block, let the guy go, or yank him back.

“Maybe we’re related, somewhere way back, and the genes for this generation just rolled up Twilight Zone,” Jake suddenly said. He was digging around in his pockets, just speeding up in panic when he found what he was looking for and pulled it out. The keys were big and old-fashioned, crusted with rust like dried blood. He snorted to himself. “Nah.”

“You’re actually not the first Dean lookalike I’ve ever run into,” Sam had to mention. He pulled his own hands out of his pockets, then rehooked his thumbs in them. For some reason, he didn’t want to get going yet.

For some reason. Honestly. He didn’t want to get going because that meant committing himself to fixing up things between Dean and himself. And doing that scared the hell out of him: how many ways could he screw up this latest attempt? Lots.

“Seriously?” Jake looked up from the keys. He straightened and half-turned to face Sam, then took a step forward. “What happened?”

“He actually was this psychotic shapeshifter and almost killed us. Also, he stole Dean’s identity and died with it, so technically my brother’s legally dead.” Sam grinned, not entirely without humor. “You’re a lot easier to handle.”

That stopped Jake, but only for a moment. He tilted his head, his expression running the spectrum from incredulous to grimly amused to bitter anger. And then to something more hot-tempered than that…something that made Sam raise his eyebrows and stiffen against the car at the same time.

“Compared to which one?” Jake acidly asked. Then he shook his head, mumbling to himself louder and louder till he snarled.

Sam jerked, Jake grabbed his shoulder and used it to slam up against him, and then they were locked in a violent wreck of a kiss. Their teeth clacked, snagged on each other before sliding roughly over tongue, lips, whatever other soft tissue got in the way. It wasn’t a second in before Sam tasted blood, and two seconds in, Jake was smearing it over Sam’s chin as he sucked Sam’s tongue into his mouth, knees banging hard into Sam like he wanted something to dislocate.

His fingers dug grooves over the top of Sam’s shoulder and downwards, trying to split the muscles in Sam’s back. Once or twice he came near a major nerve and the feeling numbed out in parts of Sam’s torso, hip, leg, then roared back. When that happened, Sam bit down hard on whichever part of Jake he happened to have in his mouth at the time. Lip and Jake sagged, opened his mouth. Line of the jaw and Jake let Sam twist them around, groaning once as his hips hit the car.

“Harmless college fun?” he gasped. His hand snaked between them, rucking up Sam’s shirt till suddenly his rough palm was pressed to Sam’s side. It skated downwards to claw at Sam’s waist, kneading the flesh there as Sam rocked his thigh up against Jake’s crotch. Jake’s erection pushed forward and Sam would push back, and Jake would give a little more than he really should be comfortably able to.

“In college I liked girls.” Sam moved his mouth to Jake’s neck and sucked at the tendons, rubbed off the gritty dirt on Jake’s skin so it scraped over his teeth. He felt Jake bend, turn his throat into it and dropped his hands to Jake’s hips. Cradled them gently, then pushed _hard_.

Jake grunted. His hipbones rolled under Sam’s hands and he slid up, pulling Sam’s mouth down to the collar of his shirt. His left foot lightly kicked Sam in the shin. “Well, I’m not harmless, either.”

His legs spread and Sam moved between them without really thinking about it, sliding one hand up to twist in Jake’s hair. It slowed them, but that just seemed to give them more time to bruise each other up.

“Fuck,” Jake muttered, squirming. He hissed when Sam clamped down on his thigh, one thumb riding high to needle in where Jake’s jeans had drawn tight around his hip crease. Had to be cutting off the blood circulation, but that didn’t seem to affect Jake’s cock any. The bulge rubbing over Sam’s belt-buckle, occasionally running higher to rock into Sam’s bellybutton and thus liquefy a little more of his guts, even grew a little. “Fuck.”

“Is that a statement or a question?” Sam’s head felt a little fuzzy, but he wasn’t going to blame this on that. Not with the way his fingers were flexing around Jake’s ass, or with the way Jake was grinding back into him.

Jake shuddered, then licked a long streak from the base of Sam’s neck to behind his ear. His tongue-tip seemed to pluck every one of Sam’s nerves so they hummed high and whining in the background. But he held his position. Even dug in a little, fingers in Sam and heels of his feet into the car, making the metal ring. “Fuck _me_ ,” he said. “ _Me_.”

Sam started to snap something about Dean, but then Jake was melting up against him, all that anger running to terrified desperation, and the way Jake was begging in his ear for Sam to stay with him, to not take him away, to see _him_ told Sam they weren’t in his issues anymore. Jarring wake-up call.

Well, the world _didn’t_ revolve around him. It’d just crashed down on him a lot lately.

But not right now, said the salty, grimy taste in Sam’s mouth. He worked his mouth into Jake’s shirt, biting along the collarbone, and moved his hands to Jake’s waistband. Like a mirror, Jake’s hands did the same to Sam, but stopped once they’d hooked into Sam’s belt. They seized up against Sam’s back when Sam pulled open Jake’s buckle, grinding sharp knuckles into Sam’s spine. Jake breathed hot and ragged against Sam’s throat, just moaning now.

He wasn’t doing this for Dean, or because he was so fucked up he could include incest in that now. No, because if he’d wanted Dean for this, he would’ve picked somebody that would’ve pushed back past this point. He would’ve _liked_ somebody that kept pushing, but his fingers popped the button through the hole in the top of Jake’s jeans and Jake whimpered, and it sank low into Sam’s dick, making the heated blood pooling there even heavier, so that wasn’t it. He liked Jake shutting up, Jake clinging to him and letting him loosen the jeans, slip his hands between them and Jake’s smooth skin and slide Jake out of them as effortlessly as he’d drop a spent cartridge out of a shotgun. He liked that.

He liked being able to _do_ , for once. But he never had a chance to get this close to anyone except Dean, and maybe he didn’t want to have Dean that way, but over the years it’d been made clear to him that Dean was practically the only person who’d be around long enough for Sam to have that kind of relationship. So it was like unconscious imprinting, like how girls supposedly liked men similar to their fathers. So maybe it was incest—just a more abstract version. It _was_ because _of_ Dean. Yeah, _fuck_.

“What are you looking at?” Jake jerked at Sam, making them both shake. His eyes understood something—not everything, but a lot, and they weren’t as pissed off as Sam would’ve thought. Though they were pissed off. “What?”

“Just—” Sam’s shirt was still pulled up, trapped that way, and when he pulled Jake out of the jeans, the flushed head of Jake’s cock burned up Sam’s bared belly “—just do that. Keep doing that.”

He shoved Jake back on the car. The metal had to be pretty hot, even if it was still early in the morning, and Jake did hiss. He bucked forward and his knees came up to close around Sam’s hips, pressing the whole length of his dick against Sam’s stomach. “But what—”

“I’m looking at you,” Sam snapped. They needed something, he belatedly remembered. He wrapped his arm around Jake and yanked them together, eased his mouth hard over Jake so he could feel each of Jake’s teeth behind Jake’s lip.

“Do I look like him?” Jake pressed.

Sam’s free hand came up with a bottle of oil. He couldn’t remember whether it was weaponry oil or blessed oil, cheap stuff or rare stuff, and finally he really couldn’t care. He didn’t care where the top went when he popped it off with his thumbnail, either. “Yes. What, what are you looking at?”

Jake flinched. “What do you care?”

“I don’t. I’m just asking ‘cause you—” Sam shifted and the way his jeans stretched over his hard cock made his head swim for a moment “—you did.”

“Oh. Oh.” Said to Sam’s face, then to the hinge of Sam’s jaw as Jake fiercely bit at it, as his hands resumed pulling at Sam’s back. “Then never the fuck mind. I was just being stupid.”

The first touch of Sam’s finger sent him clawing up Sam. His teeth sank into Sam’s ear. “ _Jesus_.” Then he dropped back down an inch, surprising Sam, and he went stiff for the briefest second possible before he was very slowly rocking himself down, his ass nestling against Sam’s knuckles. “Fuck.”

Sam opened his mouth, then closed it. He curled up his second finger, trying to get it beneath the curve of Jake’s buttock, but lost his concentration when Jake abruptly swung a hand around and wedged it over his prick. It felt like Jake had just pushed Sam’s mind into his gut and then crushed it there against Sam’s spine, letting it run lazily out of his fingers.

Jake breathed harshly in Sam’s ear, hiking himself up. His fingers dragged up with him, and Sam’s jeans slipped a little so Sam realized his fly had been undone. “ _Fuck_ ,” Jake hissed.

“But—”

Fingers just grazed the top of Sam’s dick. He staggered a bit, then recovered and slammed Jake back against the car. Jake’s legs started to drop and Sam shoved his hands beneath them. For a moment, they were on the verge of going to the ground in a mess, but between the car and Sam, Jake managed to stay up. His hands crawled up as Sam shifted around, letting the head of his cock rub around Jake’s ass, trying to make things fit without having to let go of anything. They got to Sam’s shoulders just as Sam finally felt some give and pressed in; Sam had to fight to get through the first inch, with Jake whistling breath through clenched teeth in his ear, and it didn’t get much easier after that. But it was _good_ , Jake wrapping so tight around him that he almost thought he could feel blood being squeezed _back_ into his groin, and much as Jake was grinding his teeth, the pressure of his fingers hadn’t let up any. He even twisted around, making Sam’s vision dance with white spots, once Sam was in him up to the balls.

“God,” Sam said.

“Fuck him,” Jake responded, hitching up Sam. He groaned, his thighs trembling so hard Sam could feel it even through their bunched-up clothes. “No, fuck me.”

Sam snarled so it came mostly through his nose, a raspy feral sound, and pushed Jake up, then let gravity slam him back in Jake. He got Jake braced better against the car while Jake was hissing from that, then did the pushing himself. His knees banged over and over against the car door, leaving dents and probably bone-bruises, rattling them so Jake’s teeth bounced from Sam’s lip to his jaw, his jaw to his nose. If they didn’t break the window, it’d be a goddamn miracle.

Jake shut up again, reducing himself to the jagged breathing and occasional low twist-the-spine whining. He threw himself against Sam so hard that every other beat, they were almost going over backwards. He threw himself like he wanted Sam to break him.

“Fuck. Fuck—” Sam’s breath temporarily cut out on him “—hell—”

And Jake came with a sucked-in gasp, wetting Sam’s shirt to his stomach. He sagged some, but made an effort to keep on going. A sloppy, tired effort that nevertheless was more than plenty since Sam hadn’t been that far behind him. The edge loomed up, then disappeared as Sam went over.

* * *

“You want to help me?” Jake put sweat-sticky hands around both sides of Sam’s jaw, turned Sam to kiss him with surprising gentleness. “Pick up the phone when I call. And don’t tell me anything. Talk to me.”

Sam nodded. He closed his eyes and let Jake move back, let the parts of Jake’s mouth slip off till he only had Jake’s lower lip. Then he sucked it, pulled Jake back a little. Let go and felt the hitch in the other man.

“I think we’re good on my end.” He rested his forehead against Jake’s for a moment. “Don’t lose my number.”

“Okay,” Jake said. And several minutes later, still disheveled but standing much steadier than he’d been out in the desert, “I’m going.”

“Vaya con Dios,” Sam told him, with a lousy accent and a lousier smile.

Jake just laughed at him, walking haltingly backward. His eyes weren’t smiling at Sam, but they were clear. And they were calm.

Sam let him go.

* * *

“You know,” Dean said with remarkable composure, “He almost looks like my twin.”

“I noticed.” After a brief, nauseating check that revealed no unexpected demonic traces anywhere nearby, Sam straightened up in his seat. He didn’t look at his brother.

Dean didn’t sigh, but the sound still echoed through the car. “Is there something you want to tell me, Sam?”

“He’s the guy I saved from the chupacabras.” Sam thought about waving, but before he could, Jake’s head went up and Jake looked straight at him. Then Jake glanced at the traffic passing between them, and Sam relaxed. Marginally.

Beat of silence from Dean. He did that more often now, at least trying to think about it before he jumped. “The trip where you came back with your head pulled out of your ass?”

Of course, that didn’t make him any less likely to say something that made Sam want to smack him in the head. “Yes.” Sam looked at Dean now, at Dean’s closed-up face, and bit his lip. “Look, it’s not what it looks like. It—”

“Next time you decide to make our lives even weirder, you could give me some kind of explanation first,” Dean muttered, sinking down in his seat. He flicked a glance at Jake, who was now crossing the street, then sulkily arched the eyebrow over his chalky blind eye. “If it _keeps_ your head out of your ass, okay.” Then he winced, his lips in a too-familiar grimace, and shifted. “Pill?”

“Another half-hour.” Sam didn’t quite make it a question or a denial.

After a long glower, Dean huffed and rolled his head to idly check out some girls passing on the sidewalk. Sam got out of the car just as Jake walked up to it. They stared at each other.

“Your advice worked,” Jake finally said. He jerked his chin at the car. “Dean?”

Dean’s head suddenly popped out. “Get in already. We’re late to a job, so you and Sam can catch up on the way there. And then I’ve got a date tonight, so I’m just gonna…not be around.”

He was definitely weirded out and not exactly getting it, and Sam would have to explain things in great, excruciating detail later, but Dean was trying. It made Sam smile a little.

“Want coffee?” Sam asked.

Jake shrugged, still a little wary. But he started moving forward. “Sure. Has to be better than the shit down by the border.”

“Yeah, definitely,” Sam said. He opened the door, and Jake got in.


	2. Hell in a Bucket

“It’s like sunspots.”

“What?”

“Sunspots. This thing happens when the sun…uh, gets dark spots on them, and it’s been proven that the sunspot cycle comes with an increase in extreme bad weather. Demons do the same thing: every so often, there’s a break somewhere and more of them—and more powerful ones—can get through than usual. Then they look around for a body, because it’s harder to send them back to hell when they’re in a person.”

“But how does it happen?”

“That’s the thing: nobody knows. They just know that this one thing always comes with the other, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

“So shut up and deal.”

“…that wasn’t _exactly_ what I was aiming for.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s what it sounds like, whether you mean it or not.”

* * *

As jobs went, this was as close to a cakewalk as it ever got. They’d guessed it was a poltergeist from the online report, and when they got there, it actually was a poltergeist and nothing but a poltergeist. Straightforward home invasion by a malicious ghost, without any extra complications like teenage witches or secondary spirits or half-finished hoodoo curses from decades ago. The house was even empty: its family had had enough and had high-tailed it for a stay at a relative’s place.

Dean had looked up the right ritual while Sam had drawn the protective circle and Jake had stood bemusedly around, getting on Dean’s nerves. He’d wanted the guy to stay in the car, but Jake had gotten out before he could deliver the standard spiel on dangers of the supernatural. He’d still tried afterward, but Sam had given him this weird look and Jake had made this incredibly annoying little dismissive snort.

“So that was it?” Jake said. He rocked back on his heels, then slowly turned in place. “It just…went poof?”

“What, you’d rather it picked up a handful of kitchen knives and pitched them at us for a finale?” Dean licked his forefinger and thumb. Then he pinched out the last candle and got up, scuffing at the chalk circle till he’d made a gap big enough for a person to walk through.

Jake shrugged and wandered after, but turned around after one step. He looked curiously at Sam, who was still standing in the circle, paging through Dad’s notebook. “I wasn’t saying a let-down is a bad thing. Hey, I’m all for let-downs when it comes to evil monsters. But doesn’t it make you worry a little, like maybe you missed something?”

More like Dean thought Jake was being kind of stuck-up, like maybe he didn’t realize they’d been doing this since before his parents let him go trick-or-treating by himself. Like _maybe_ \--

\--maybe he’d just flicked his eyes down Sam’s front. With Dean still here. Oh, hell no.

“Hey, Dean—Dean. Wait a second.” With his typically inconvenient timing, Sam had looked up just as Dean had been starting to sneak away. His eyebrow went up, so all that effort Dean had just put into casually straightening up had gone to waste, but he didn’t comment. He just tapped the book. “Gotta do a salt line at all the outside doors. There’s a margin note.”

“Isn’t that going to wash away in the first rain?” Jake asked, tone completely different from a second ago. Now he sounded all unsure and wary, and he’d even changed his posture. He was slouching more, head slightly down as if Sam wasn’t already three or four inches taller.

Rolling his eyes, Dean glanced towards Sam. He expected to see his brother just as disgusted by the blatant play for sympathy…but no, Sam appeared to be taking the question seriously. “It’s not supposed to be permanent. It’s…ghosts can be like injuries on a place. You put salt down like a bandage—it keeps any other ghosts from moving in till the place has healed up some.”

“Huh.” Jake pivoted sideways as Sam finally walked out of the circle, keeping it so he met Sam more side-on than face-on. He straightened up a little, lifting his chin, but it didn’t come off quite like he’d just gotten a self-confidence boost. “So that’s why you told me to do that.”

“Yeah. You did, right? Because otherwise--” He’d been bending down to grab the candles, but Sam tipped his head up again to glance at Jake.

Well, wasn’t Jake on the defensive now. He’d even taken a half-step back before he’d squared up his shoulders, and Jesus, was Dean right to be iffy on the guy. Sam could be scary…he could even be called terrifying on occasion…but this wasn’t one of those times. And here Jake was, acting a little like a cornered rat testing a cat’s range but not quite daring to just try to escape.

“Yeah, I did. It’s completely taken care of. I told you, I’m not some casefile,” Jake muttered. At least he could be snappy. Dean had been starting to think Sam had picked up a girly wuss, after all.

“Just checking.” The curtness of Sam’s voice made even Dean look twice at him; Jake twitched a bit. Then Sam sighed and gave himself a quick shake, head down. He blinked hard as he looked back up, a semi-rueful expression on his face. A little tail of hollow laughter was tacked onto the breath he blew out. “And how’s sleeping for you?”

Jake blinked, then grinned a little. His smile had more black humor to it than Dean would’ve thought the guy could manage. “Better, but I’m still looking for ways to stay awake.”

Dean made a fist of his hand, brought it up to his mouth, and coughed hard. He easily suppressed his amusement at the way they both jumped. Keeping down his dawning, incredulous comprehension of the whole scene was a hell of a lot harder. “And I believe I said I was going to be gone after we were done. Which I’m not yet.”

The oddest expression crossed Sam’s face right then, like he didn’t know whether to be sorry or annoyed or just plain weirded out. Then it was gone, and he was doing a half-decent job at pretending to be professionally brisk. “Well, you could help me clean up,” he snorted, grabbing the rest of the candles. “Are you staying around for dinner?”

“You’re buying tonight, so I’d have to, wouldn’t I?” Part of Dean was telling him he was a total moron for turning down the easy out, but another part wasn’t so sanguine now about leaving Sam and Jake alone. The whole bizarreness of seeing Jake had made him forget about all the usual background check stuff, but he was remembering now.

Jake shot Dean the kind of sidelong look that, if he were the job, would’ve meant he was the key to putting down the monster. Then he exhaled in a way that was borderline exasperated and shuffled around to scuff up the chalk circle. He glanced at Sam, who was looking damn close to shifty-eyed and uncomfortable about it.

Sam abruptly straightened up, settling the strap of their duffel bag on his shoulder. He dropped Dad’s journal into it, then shoved his hands in his pockets and lifted his head. His expression smoothed to way too nonchalant. “So did you want to hit that pizza place we passed afterward? Or the Italian one?”

His eyes started to move towards Jake, then slid back to Dean. Dean shrugged, but his stomach suddenly let out a loud growl that made him wince. Somebody snickered; Sam had been facing Dean the whole thing and his mouth hadn’t moved, but Jake had turned to stare out the window.

“Yeah, sure. And then you can fill me in about what was up with those chupacabras,” Dean said.

The muscle in Sam’s cheek twitched hard, like it wanted to jump off the bone. Whoever had snickered before suffered a short, hacking burst of coughing.

“Sounds good,” Sam replied, looking kind of twitchy.

* * *

Just when she’d been about to call it a night, somebody tromped in and thumped himself down at the bar. Son of a bitch…but this late at night, a customer wasn’t likely to be the kind who’d go easy. So she clamped down on her temper and turned around with one hand reaching for the metal baseball bat beneath the bar.

The man was late-twenties, blond, one hell of a looker from one side. Then he lifted his head so she could get the panoramic, and she couldn’t help making a little noise of shock. It looked like somebody had smashed out one of his eyes, then shoved a shaved-down cue-ball in its place.

The eye he had left was a pretty green, but tired and irritated at something. “Car accident,” he said.

“Oh.” Well, now she was embarrassed as all get-out. It wasn’t like it was the worst she’d ever seen—not by a long shot, when this bar was a favorite of the local veterans, but it was just kind of surprising to see it on somebody so young. Not that that was any excuse. “Hey…listen, this place closes early tonight. I’m sorry. But if you want a drink, you can try the bar in the Radisson down the road. They serve till 4 AM.”

He stared at her for a moment like he didn’t know what she was saying. Then he groaned beneath his breath and rubbed at his eye. “Oh, sorry. Missed the sign.” He smiled, and that still was pretty charming. He must’ve been a hellraiser before his accident. “Listen, I don’t really want a drink. It’s just that my back’s kind of fucked-up—same accident—and it’s killing me. I know you’re closing up, but could you maybe let me sit here for a couple minutes, let me catch my breath? Then I’ll be out of your hair. Cross my heart.”

“Do I look like jailbait to you?” she tartly retorted. Nope, he hadn’t been expecting that, the sweet-talker. At least he wasn’t some crazy wino. She grabbed a towel instead of the bat, but stayed near the rack on the off-chance that he was one of those nice psychopaths. Then she looked at him again, and couldn’t keep up the bad temper so much; he looked really, genuinely exhausted. “Okay. You can sit there. Watch me clean up, if that’s your kind of show.”

A sleepy kind of warmth slipped into his eyes. With his kind, it had to be more than half-reflex, but it did sort of stroke her ego a little. “It could be.”

Rolling her eyes, she wiped down half the bar, starting at the end farthest from him. When she got back to him, he’d dropped his head in his hands and was rubbing at his temples, muttering to himself. She nudged his elbow and he stiffened, then raised his arms with a hurried, distant smile of apology.

Well, there was a reason she was a bartender instead of a waitress. “What’s up? Girlfriend?”

“Family,” he said. His eyebrow was quirked. “Oh, what the hell. Wanna hear about it?”

“Somebody took the radio a while ago, so that’ll do,” she slowly replied.

“It’ll do.” He chuckled to himself. “Okay. _That’ll_ do.”

* * *

“So he really is half-demon?” It was a toss-up what was testing Dean’s patience more: Jake’s story or the brownish tinge in what was supposed to be marinara sauce for the breadsticks.

“No, I could have been. I chose to be human.” Jake stuffed a breadstick in his mouth like he wished it was something else he was ripping up. After a moment’s hesitation, he’d sat on Sam’s side of the booth. Thankfully, all four hands on that side were visible. “Marisol did leave a body—there was an autopsy and a grave and everything. So I guess she was a possessed person. That means I’m not really biologically related. Or something like that.”

He started to reach for the napkin holder, but had to duck when Sam almost smacked his head in an attempt to get the waitress. Sam twisted back to face forward and sat down, nodding an apology to Jake. “I don’t know what’s keeping them—we’ve been waiting for the pizza for forty minutes now.”

Sometimes Dean just despaired for his brother. It hadn’t been just their waitress that had vanished—all of them had, and only the lone waiter was left in the room. Occasionally he shot an annoyed look back at the kitchen doors, from which extremely loud bursts of giggling could be heard.

“They’re probably drawing straws to see who asks us,” Jake snorted. His eyebrows rose at Sam’s surprised expression; his hand continued over the table to absently take the last breadstick. He tore it in two and dropped one half back in the basket, then took the other back to his plate to dabble in sauce. “So what is the story, if they ever work up the balls to ask?”

“He and I are brothers, and you’re a third cousin from the backwoods side of the family.” Dean caught some movement at the edge of his vision and turned to see their waitress finally bringing out the pizza.

Sam’s jaw dropped open. Jake stared at Dean for a couple seconds, like he was waiting for Dean’s real response. Once he figured out that that had been it, he worked his jaw a little. Then he lifted and dropped one shoulder, as if to say oh, well, and got up from the table. “Guess you take after my side of the family in more than looks. I gotta take a leak—I’ll be back in a sec.”

The waitress passed Jake and set the pizza down on the table. She opened her mouth a few times, but finally just smiled at them. Not that Sam was paying attention, seeing as he was so busy gaping at Dean. If he didn’t shut his mouth soon, Dean was going to flick a spitball into it.

“What is your _problem_?” Sam finally asked.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that? The whole thing about him looking like me…okay, that is _so_ weird, but I can live with that. I think. But him being connected to a demon? After all we’ve gone through—are you crazy?” Dean picked up his soda and sucked up a big swallow, letting the bubbles pop stingingly against the roof of his mouth. His hip was going numb so he shifted around and his back screamed: the painkillers were wearing off. Great. Yet another reason for him to be in a bad mood. “What happened to wanting somebody normal? Hell, what happened to wanting a chick? Even if he kind of reminds me of one…”

For a moment, Dean honestly wasn’t sure what Sam was going to do. Then Sam gathered himself in and calmly grabbed a slice of pizza. He lifted it high above the table and used his fingers to snap the cheese strings, twirling them up so he could pull those into his mouth first. Then he took a big bite out of the slice. Chewed. Wiped his hand on a napkin before reaching for his drink.

“I never dated a possible mass-murderer,” Dean snapped.

Sam glanced up, mouth full of pepperoni and mozzarella, like he didn’t know where Dean was coming from. Oh, sure. He waved his hand, then just drank from the rim instead of through the straw.

“And that one in Tennessee wasn’t the one actually doing all that—it was her freaky dead control-freak of a grandmother.” Dean got his own piece of pizza. If they were going to play that way, then fine. He could keep his cool while getting whipped in the face with tomato sauce, too. “Look, Sam, I’m just a little concerned about his background. I don’t want his shit to come down on our heads.”

“Like we don’t have that happen all the time,” Sam mumbled. The food was in the way, but he still managed to sound drier than a Blue-law town on a Sunday. “Anyway, this is only the second time I’ve ever met him, he’s already killed his demon, and I’m not even touching the part about chicks.”

Half the slice was gone before Dean even really tasted any of it, and then it was just to note that they’d way overdone the herbs. It was bitter as all get-out. “Just because his demon’s dead doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any problems anymore.”

Sam paused, then dropped the small fragment of pizza he had left and put both hands on the table. They were in fists, but then they suddenly uncurled as Sam laughed. He picked up his napkin and started wiping off his fingers, still shaking his head. “Jesus, Dean. Why don’t you just—”

“What the hell can he do, anyway? We can’t just—you know we have to travel light,” Dean said. He sounded uncomfortably close to pleading, which annoyed the hell out of him. But he had to get Sam to…well, to get it. They had so much to deal with, they had to keep stripped down so far, that any excess would just get in the way.

“I can talk to him. Thanks to his background,” Sam muttered.

A sharp pain jagged up Dean’s spine. He winced, feeling his teeth rock in their sockets. “What, have I gone deaf or something? I’m pretty sure I still hear fine.”

Sam twitched hard, seeming like he was about to launch into a rant. But at the last minute, he completely clamped down. He tossed the napkin back on the table, then followed that up with a couple crumpled bills. “There’s my share. See you at the motel.” When Dean reached for him, he swung his arm out of the way. “It’s not just talking, Dean. And it’s not healthy to keep everything in the family. That’s what went wrong with him—and that’s part of what went wrong with us, too.”

Several seconds passed before Dean realized the reason he wasn’t talking back was because his mouth was hanging open. By then Sam had gotten halfway across the restaurant, and Jake was sizing up the whole situation from the restroom entrance.

Dean dragged his jaw muscles back into gear. “What the hell was that supposed to mean?”

The door banged after Sam. Jake looked at it, worried and confused, then looked at Dean. His expression rapidly went from ‘what the hell?’ to ‘what the hell is with you?’ and he took one slow step towards the door, then hurried out.

Practically the whole pizza was left. After a long moment, Dean called over the waitress and asked for a box. His back gave him another warning stab and he told it to shut up. He wasn’t going running after Sam, so it could relax. If Sam got any more wound up, he’d be taking off for another couple of weeks, and that wouldn’t help any. So Dean’s temper could shut up, too. Goddamn it.

* * *

“That’s probably one of the smarter things you did,” she said. She wrung out the towel over the sink, then swished it around beneath the running water for one last go at the bar.

Dean looked irritated. Well, if he’d expected her to completely side with him, then he really didn’t understand how the whole sympathetic-bartender gig worked. “Yeah? What if he sneaks off in the middle of the night?”

“What, with this guy with the shady background? That he’s met twice now?” Rolling her eyes, she slapped the dishrag into the sink and turned off the water. Then she checked the floor…it looked okay, so she wouldn’t have to break out the mop. “Maybe if he were a girl, and way, way dumber than he’d have to be in order to get into any college, I’d believe that. Honestly, it just sounds like your brother’s got an itch, so why not let him scratch it and get it out of his system?”

He looked surprised. If he said something about not expecting such mercenary thoughts from a pretty young thing like her, she was going to hit him with a bottle.

“Um.” Dean fiddled with the cuff of his jacket. It was a pretty sweet leather coat. “I don’t think I really explained things right.”

“Yeah, I could tell. Let me guess: you guys aren’t traveling zoologists,” she drawled.

She’d seen a lot of uncomfortable winces since she’d started slinging drinks around—she even thought of herself as a kind of connoisseur of them—but this one definitely was a standout. So much so that she ended up just leaning against the liquor rack and watching in fascination. There was head-bobbing. There were hand gestures and shoulder movements. It was amazing.

“Can I ask you something? Are you Catholic?” Dean asked. Then he snorted and flipped that away with his hand. “Never mind, that’s going to take too long. If I tell you demons are literally real, are you going to laugh at me?”

“I’m…I…” She shut her mouth before the stammering got any more embarrassing and continued thinking in silence. She wasn’t exactly sure what reaction she should be having.

Dean watched her with the kind of wary expression that kicked but not broken dogs got. He was sober and drug-free, as far as she could tell, and he probably wasn’t really insane. Insane people didn’t care that much about other people, she figured. This was probably going to be a mistake, but she figured since he did care, she’d chance it.

“Well, I’m not laughing,” she finally said. “Though I also don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“I was getting to that.” He straightened up on the stool and leaned forward, relief quickly passing to earnestness. “So it works like this…”

* * *

About a third of the way back to the motel, Sam calmed down enough to realize that it had to be Jake following him, not Dean. Dean would’ve called out or grabbed him by now. Jake just trailed after at a distance that was short enough for his footsteps to get on Sam’s already raw nerves. But they kept passing people—joggers, late grocery-shoppers—so Sam clamped down on himself till they were actually in the motel room. Then he turned around. “What?”

Some blinking. “What the hell did I miss while I was in the bathroom?” Jake said. He glanced over his shoulder, then carefully leaned himself against the door, hands in his pockets.

Sam…didn’t want to answer that. So he walked over to the table-and-chair set and flopped down in the chair. Then he let his arm drop on the table so it overlapped his laptop. After a moment, he pulled up the screen and hit the ‘power’ button.

“Way to avoid the conversation.” Jake kept standing there.

Once the wallpaper had loaded, Sam turned off the computer and pushed down the top. “Dean thinks you’re a bad idea.”

“Okay. Very informative.” Sarcasm wavered in and out of Jake’s voice. He picked at his jacket zipper for a couple seconds before he sighed and hauled himself out of it. After tossing it onto the nearest bed, he resumed leaning. “You thought I was a bad idea, so you can’t be arguing over that.”

He looked a lot better than he had in Mexico. He’d filled out a little, till he was reasonably healthy, and the dark rings beneath his eyes were much lighter. And the clothes were better, even if a dark blue shirt in some kind of silky-looking fabric caused a temporary disconnect in Sam’s head, because Dean would _never_ wear that kind of thing.

This wasn’t about Dean in that way, Sam reminded himself. His head was starting to hurt, and certain parts of his brain were sounding like they needed to be readjusted, or sporked, or something. Actually, it would’ve helped if it were totally about Dean, and totally in that way. Then Sam could just invoke the principle of inbreeding depression, plus a good dose of whatever social-code moral revulsion he’d managed to get into himself over the years, and it’d be easy. Easier. He could deal with that type of logic-bending.

“Are you pissed off I called you after all?” Jake asked. He sounded a lot closer than he’d been before.

And Sam had ended up staring at his feet without noticing. He lifted his gaze and saw Jake’s knees, then the rest of Jake, standing right in front of him and swaying like either he was going to hit Sam or drop to his knees in another second.

“You know, if you want me to hit the road, you could just say so instead of pulling this—this _passive_ crap. Jesus. What the hell is it with you…” Jake lifted his hand in a sharp, cutting gesture, then slashed it down as he half-turned. It snapped into his hip, then slowly curved to rest there as he stared disbelievingly at the wall. “What? I’m not so interesting now that I’m all wrapped up? Do I have to be a fucking _case_ to get your attention? Is that really why you guys do the stuff you do?”

“You’re not a case,” Sam snapped. Yeah, that option would’ve been easier, too. House rule—in _his_ house, anyway—never sleep with somebody who might end up having a black magic altar tucked away somewhere. “Why’d you call, anyway? Did you just want somebody to fuck you out of your trauma again?”

Jake’s exhale was like a bullet report. He actually went back a step, shaking his head a little. Then his chin came back up and he made a heated try at stabbing Sam to death with his eyes. “You’re more of a prick than your brother.”

“I thought you would’ve noticed that the last time.” Sam slouched and glared right back. He had a right to that. If Jake hadn’t called, Sam could’ve just written up the whole episode as some near-dreamtime reality check and been vaguely grateful to the man. He wouldn’t have to think about why Jake and not any of the others had worked as a reality check. He wouldn’t have to think about why he wanted it so much to be a goddamned reality check. He sure as hell wouldn’t have to worry about how to really explain it to Dean without fucking up the fragile rapport they’d managed to rebuild.

“I _did_ ,” Jake said. His lips were drawing back from his teeth so Sam could see the flicking roll of his tongue behind them, spinning acid into words. “Pretty damn hard not to, considering my _position_.”

They stared at each other. The hair on the back of Sam’s neck was stiff and straight-up, ninety degrees to the skin, like so many little needles sticking out. He could see the rigidity of Jake’s shoulders beneath the loose shirt; Jake’s jaw muscles were a study in liquidity in comparison, flexing and tightening.

Jake moved. Whether it was forward or back didn’t really matter: Sam’s foot hooked his knee from behind and the end result was forward. Sam yanked himself up in a rush as Jake slapped one hand down on the table, almost making it tip, as Jake’s knee or shin hit the chair just where Sam’s crotch had been a moment ago.

He grabbed the back of Jake’s head. The hair was too short, slipping off his fingers, but he dragged his hand down and caught Jake’s neck, pulled him down while the other man was still trying to catch his balance. Got his arms and thighs thumped roundly for it, but then Jake was moaning, already trying to shove his tongue into Sam’s mouth. He sucked on Sam’s bottom lip, then slid down to attack Sam’s jaw, tilting Sam’s head towards the table. His hand was still on it, grinding its heel hard into the grain till the wood was damn near bending.

Sam pushed his other hand out from between them, ran it over Jake’s back and down his hip to squeeze Jake’s thigh. Fingers jittered over his belt buckle, then skated sideways to dig at the crease the edge of his front pocket was making. “Did you come back because you wanted to know more about what we do?” he muttered.

Jake stilled, then bucked and twisted, like he wanted to jump away while breaking Sam’s neck. He smacked at Sam’s chest, leaving bruises but not doing too much in the way of escape. “You goddamn single-minded son of a _bitch_ \--”

Maybe Sam was in the spine-mutilating position, but the way Jake was bent over him, one knee on the seat and shoved in against Sam’s increasingly interested prick, meant he was the one with lousy leverage. He should’ve thrown himself sideways, at least, but instead he opted for straight back; he got four or five inches away before the ill-balance got to him, probably making him feel like he was going to fall on his head, and couldn’t help moving forward again. Which Sam helped along with his hand around Jake’s leg, clamping down till the shifting muscles were still. He tossed his other arm around Jake’s neck, let it slide with Jake’s struggling and got hold of Jake’s wrist just as it was going for its third thumping at Sam’s chest.

“It’s a goddamn reasonable question.” Sam yanked at Jake’s arm, twisting it some, and Jake sucked in breath over his teeth. Fell forward so his erection grazed Sam, and there was something in that. When Sam dug his fingers into Jake’s thigh, the something definitely swelled, leaving Sam’s mind momentarily in serious over-processing mode as he jumped to conclusions.

“Only if you’re as fucked up as—oh, wait. I forgot. You _are_ that fucked—” Jake _hissed_ and twisted again, but with less violence in his urgency, more slip/slide body-contact. He jerked himself up so he briefly was staring down at Sam, eyes gone dark and snarling.

Sam rewrapped his fingers around Jake’s wrist, then pushed it back behind the other man. He had to force it over Jake’s resistance, but as far as resistance went, it wasn’t totally against Sam. He watched Jake’s pupils dilate and lips part in a slow, shock-jagged exhale with a weird, almost scientific detachment. Well. This kind of had come up last time, too. And maybe Sam had been studiously not-thinking thinking about it since, half-worried that it was a sign of him losing his grounding. That he liked it maybe like how a demon might like pushing people around from tragedy to tragedy.

“Said the fucking kettle,” Sam snapped back.

Jake made a rasping, furious sound and wrenched himself to the right. Sam pulled him back. His breath stuttered and he snarled again, but hollowly and a little panicky. He twisted his free arm out from between them, and Sam intercepted that wrist and shoved it back with the other one. And Jake moaned and went down in a writhing, angry, _needy_ mess, dragging the hard line of his erection over Sam’s stomach, sucking at Sam’s tongue till Sam could feel the strain deep-rooted into his jaw.

The chair creaked dangerously. Something suddenly gave way about an inch, jolting them so Jake was pressed so deeply against Sam that he had to be coming away with belt-buckle imprints in his stomach, denim grain over his cock. Sam yanked Jake downwards, got a knee sliding painfully over his thighbone. The floorboards jiggled a bit as Jake’s feet hit the floor in a quick one-two.

At that point, Sam tried levering himself up and out of the chair, but he only managed an abbreviated forward scoot, and that was hard-won against Jake’s squirming. He braced himself in place just in time to push up and back a rough grinding slide from Jake, then tried at least to get forward another couple of inches. But he accidentally twisted around Jake’s wrists as he did; Jake stiffened, then turned hot and liquid, trying to get himself seated further down on Sam’s legs. He ran up against the chair arms and pushed against them till they were practically prying their nails out of the chair back.

The edge of the seat was digging mercilessly into Sam’s ass, a hair from giving him a permanent horizontal crease. He tried to push up, but Jake was shoving himself in just close enough for there to be a tantalizing, miserably brief pressure every few gasps, and every time he did, Sam’s leg-muscles refused to do anything but collapse.

The angle of the seat changed on Sam, and he found himself scuffing his feet to keep balance as the chair boosted itself up behind him, like the poltergeist had followed them home. He said something—was in the process of saying something, anyway, when Jake arched up so his erection rasped past Sam’s and Sam jerked and the chair just skidded out from under them.

“Fuck!”

They were partially, forcibly separated upon impact, and it would’ve been temporary if Jake had done everything and Sam had just sat there, but Sam couldn’t do that. Fuck. Right. He stiff-armed Jake back, then pushed himself away for good measure.

Jake threw up his hands with surprising violence. “What? What? Can’t you just take it as sex, at least?”

“Yeah, like you could,” Sam snorted. He lifted his hand to do something or the other and saw it shaking, so he put it down. It didn’t help too much with the shocky feeling.

“I could,” Jake sharply retorted. Then he settled back, trying to catch his breath. He looked up at the ceiling, and when he brought his head down again, it was like that effort had drained all the frustration out of him. But there was still that desperate begging, and that was better at cutting, anyway. “If that’s all I’m going to get.”

Sam…just couldn’t answer that. He tried to at least think about it for a few seconds, but it wasn’t any good.

In the end, he let himself fall backwards. The first thing he saw was the bottom side of the chair, which pointed out how close he’d come to concussing himself right then. Maybe he’d concussed himself already and didn’t remember? It might explain things.

Jake exhaled loudly twice, first brusque and then resigned. “Fucking great.”

“There is something you should know about demons,” Sam finally said. Mostly because it was still on his mind, and since he was mainly on auto-pilot right now, it got shoved out there.

* * *

“Yeah? Well, that’s what it sounds like, whether you mean it or not.” It’d been such a long explanation that she’d eventually just given up on trying to look like she had stuff to clean and had just seated herself down on an adjacent barstool with a glass of water.

Dean shot her an annoyed look and stole said glass of water in the same movement. He was welcome to it—she hadn’t touched it, and he was being so pissy about everything that he could use some refreshment.

“Look, babe, it’s not just cheesy horror movies. It’s my family—what’s left of my family, which makes it even more important—and what we do for a living. I promised Sammy I was going to take care of him. And you know…” he worked his shoulders in awkward regret “…maybe I haven’t done as great a job of it as I should have…”

“If he used to take off every few months to go try to either catch an STD or get his neck broken, then I’d call that a shitty job, actually,” she mused.

That was for the ‘babe.’ It looked like Dean might’ve caught on and understood after the first outraged second, but he didn’t look any less irritated. “ _Anyway_. That doesn’t mean I should stop trying.”

“Doesn’t necessarily mean you should try harder, either. Don’t suppose you guys have ever considered taking up a new line of work?” She put her arms up behind her, resting them on the bar-rail, then kicked out with her legs. From the corner of her eye, she could tell Dean had reflexively checked those out. Eye-rolling, but she was grudgingly impressed that he was that dedicated to being a perve. “I’m just asking, you know. If you’ve got some reason, then okay, I can…maybe understand it once I’ve heard it. No guarantees, but I’ll try.”

Dean snickered a little, mostly sarcastically. “Put it this way—might’ve been an option before, but with all the shit we had to pull to get that first demon, the one tailing our family, we’re not exactly fit for normal employment. It’s not that we couldn’t do it.” He was obviously remembering he had an ego to keep up. “But you know, that thing where you’re supposed to picture whether you can do it for ten years and not go nuts and come in to work one day with an AK-47? Not happening for us.”

“Okay,” she said.

He obviously was expecting a lot more. Well, he was just going to have to be disappointed. Like she hadn’t seen her share of people stuck in unhappy lives and ready to snap…and like they didn’t usually snap once they’d gotten drunk enough, trying to take it out on people like her. Better have them redirecting it towards something constructive, she figured. It was why she’d always thought the kids in high school civics class who wanted to disband the army were total idiots.

“I just—don’t want him to go off. For good.” Dean unhappily poked at the condensation rings spreading out from the base of the water-glass. “And okay, this guy _apparently_ was responsible for getting Sam to come back early the last time, and coming back less messed up, but he _looks like me_. Plus he can do…Sam can get things from him that he can’t from me. So I started thinking…”

Ew, was her first thought. And it was her second thought once she’d put together enough to get the full picture. That was pretty fucked up, even for a bar about twenty miles from inbred scary-ass rural Appalachia.

“Not that I’m ever gonna tell him this, ‘cause it’d undermine my status as the older brother, but I’m not sure I can do okay all by myself. Especially since my back—” Dean winced and put his hand behind himself, and it didn’t seem to be just for emphasis “—and the thing is, I know he could, if he wanted to. He has. He just hasn’t gone back to it yet because he’s Sam and Sam kind of needs people to make it a your-way-or-the-highway thing before he’ll go off. His guilt works in this really weird way.”

“If you leave because you’re pissed off and the other guy’s not willing to work with you, then it’s not so much your fault as your noble decision?” she guessed.

The side of Dean’s mouth twitched, first down and then up. He was obviously debating whether to defend the family or just give in to the truth in this case.

“And this Jake guy might be the highway.” She winced. “Um. Excuse the shitty metaphor. But anyway, if that’s all it takes…well, damn, either Jake’s the best sex this side of the Mississippi, or your brother’s a total asshole at heart.”

“Sam’s not an asshole,” Dean snapped. Apparently that was his limit for badmouthing of the blood.

She grinned at him. “Jake’s probably not that great, either. If he was, you’d be all worked up because you were jealous of your brother, not because you’re jealous of your brother’s possible boyfriend.”

Dean made a face at her, then downed some water. He was in the middle of wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he flinched. Then he put his hand on the bar and slowly, gingerly twisted sideways till something in his spine popped. It hurt, that was clear enough, but he didn’t even cut loose with any swear words. “Uh, sweetheart? I like girls. If Sam wants to play both sides, then…that’s fine as long as he stops picking ones with Satan mentioned anywhere in their résumé. Hell, it’ll help—chances are fifty percent higher he’ll get laid and get that stick out of his ass.”

“I thought that was what he was doing right now,” she said in a mild tone. The look he gave her for that was even more hilarious than the first one; he deserved the slam, and if he didn’t stop with the condescending pet names, he was going to get a physical one for the next time. “But seriously, Dean. So this guy looks like you. And he puts out. But how does that equal replacing you? Unless you’re about to pull a long lecture on magical cloning out of your ass…”

Maybe she should’ve left out the parts referring to sex, since at first it looked like that was going to screw with Dean too much for him to even hear the rest. But then he frowned, drawing his brows down so she could see how facial scars might distort forehead furrowing. Weird observation, but hey, she was the one who could afford to focus on that sort of stuff.

He half-turned to stare into the water-glass for a while. She just left him to it. It’d gotten to that point in the night where she was just tired enough to feel a little detached, a little blurry at the edges, and just sitting around went nicely with that.

“Okay. You have a point,” Dean finally said. He put his hands on the edge of the bar, then straightened his arms to push himself off and onto his feet. He was uneasy and hunched up at first, but as he kept on thinking, he relaxed. His right hand dipped into his coat pocket, then came out with a candle and a bag of what was probably salt.

She stiffened, then shrugged and stayed where she was. It wasn’t like she hadn’t guessed, after all. “You’re not the first guy that’s ever come in here with that idea.”

“The bar closes early one day of the week because years ago, you stayed too long talking to a patron and got knifed just afterward by a burglar, when you were taking out the trash for the last time,” Dean said. He settled back on his heels and jiggled the salt and candle in his hand. “You crawled back into the bar and died here. And it’s said that ever since, you come back on that day of the week to finish closing up like you didn’t get to then.”

“I guess,” she slowly replied. “I thought about it for a while when I first figured out what’d happened to me, but I never was much for that kind of philosophy. I like this bar, you know. I really liked my job—when I was dying, I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, God, what if I hadn’t stuck around and talked Tommy through his girlfriend jitters.’”

Curiosity flickered over Dean’s face. “What were you thinking?”

“‘Fuck, that fucking hurts.’ Something like that.” And for a moment, it really did. She quickly shoved that away; it’d taken forever to learn how to get past that, and she wasn’t in the mood to start over again. “Look, if you want to send me away, I probably can’t do more than chase you out of here with a couple thrown bottles. But I wanna point out that I haven’t hurt anyone, and that I’m not really feeling that I’m ‘stuck’ or ‘trapped’ or desperately need to move on.”

He solemnly regarded her for nearly a minute, doing a lot of internal recalculating. Then he shrugged and put the stuff back in his pocket. “You’re not exactly what I’m used to running into.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” she snorted. She flipped her hand around. “Well, I used to. It’s gotten kind of lonely, lately…guys like you are the only ones that ever hang around for long, and the last one that used to come in here regularly…stopped. I do hate that—that I can’t go out and see what’s happened to you.”

“I can imagine.” Dean stood there for a little longer, then turned around and walked towards the door. He stopped halfway there and turned back. “Hey. Thanks.”

She smiled. It hurt at the corners. “No problem. Hope your back gets better.”

He’d resumed walking again, but his pace momentarily slowed at that. Then he sped up again, one hand going up so he could swing himself casually out of the door. “See you later.”

After a moment, she decided she could grin at _that_. Dean seemed like the kind of guy that would mean it. Cool.

But man, it was a little bit of a relief to have him out. It was getting way too close to dawn, and she was tired. Really tired. Time to close up, definitely.

* * *

“Yeah? Well, that’s what it sounds like, whether you mean it or not.” Jake slid into Sam’s line of vision, expression a cross between exasperated and anxious. He had an uneven, curving line of little red marks trailing from one corner of his mouth off across his jawline, and Sam had a damned hard time not looking at it. “Look, obviously I already know hanging around you can be dangerous in weird ways. I’ve already had to bury people I loved because of the same reason.”

“Having both of us in the same place has to double the chances of death by supernatural causes. At least,” Sam had to observe.

Jake sensibly didn’t try to immediately reply to that. It wasn’t the kind of argument that lent itself to persuasive snap rejoinders. But he did move closer, so his knuckles bumped Sam’s side. “For God’s sake. You going into a house with some ghost that can toss around bowling balls raises the odds way more. And for all you know, I could leave town, get possessed and call up Mom to kick-start Revelations. Give me something that’s _not_ bullshit.”

“I think I’m using you to deal with some issues I’ve got about Dean.” Sam shifted himself away from Jake. His erection was down by half, but that remaining half was being stubborn about fading and making things pretty uncomfortable. Of all the times for his body to be taking Dean’s advice…the thing with Sarah hadn’t been this to dismiss.

For a moment, Sam was sure Jake was going to hit him. But instead, Jake grabbed his shoulders and shook him so his head banged on the floor before he could get his elbows propped under himself. “Do you think I’m some kind of a moron? Jesus! I _know_ that! And frankly, I don’t give a shit right now.”

He got in one last good shake before Sam threw him off. Then Sam smacked his hand down on the floor, pushing himself up, and grabbed Jake’s hand just before…had Jake actually been about to slap him? Sam wasn’t sure whether the idea amused him or pissed him off more, but at any rate, his body voted for ‘pissed off.’ He had Jake flipped over on his stomach with his hands pinned down in another second.

“Some reflexes,” Jake finally mumbled. He suddenly twisted so his face wasn’t smashed into the floor, but his hips snapped up at the same time and Sam took it for trying to throw him off.

Jake’s initial response to being slammed into the floor again was just a pained grunt. He slumped against the floor, mouth wide as he gasped for air, sometimes so loudly that Sam couldn’t hear his own rasping breaths. His eyes fluttered shut, then slitted open a crack that was just wide enough for Sam to watch the green strip of the iris roll back towards him. A scraping sound from behind them got Sam’s attention and he started to glance over his shoulder, only to jerk in surprise when Jake’s ass nuzzled up to his-- _still_ \--half-hard erection. So much for the half.

Sam bit his tongue and bowed up, trying to cut down on the friction. But the moment he eased up on Jake’s hands, the other man used the extra slack to shove himself right into Sam. Nearly hard enough to knock them over, just hard enough so that he was warm and firm and fuck, Sam was going to bite his tongue off at this rate. And then Jake actually started to rock back or forth. Or try to, anyway. Something on his clothes snagged on Sam’s belt and made it too uneven.

“Jesus. You’re that desperate? You’re so bad off you’ve got to jerk me around till I’m pissed off enough?” Sam hissed. He pulled at Jake’s hands violently enough for him to hear the plastic-fuzz carpet giving Jake a bad friction rash. Jake made an angry hurting sound and shoved back, getting their clothes untangled but mostly just getting himself deeper into Sam’s grip. “You get off on this shit?”

“So do you,” Jake gasped. His hips pivoted so only one of them was pressed up against Sam, sliding over and over Sam’s cock.

“Yeah, but I’m not the one _on the floor_.” Sam lifted one knee and quickly rammed it into Jake’s leg, knocking him down flat. Then he got that knee on the ground before he fell, too, and yanked up Jake’s hands so he only needed one hand to pin them. The groan he got was like a red-hot dagger twisting in his guts and he dove, sank his teeth into Jake’s neck to give the pain back. “I’m not the one who couldn’t go after a fucking demon that killed my whole fucking family—”

Dragged his free hand down Jake’s back. The cloth rumpled up in damp rolls beneath his palm during the following upstroke, so the second time he clawed down, he hit a wide strip of bare skin just beneath the ribcage. It heaved and flexed up into his hand, shivering whenever he let it.

“—till some random guy in the desert told me to.” Good thing Sam had his mouth off Jake at that point, or else he would’ve had some broken teeth. He twisted Jake’s wrists and stayed up, watched the furious thrashing go to slow shudders. “I’m not the one who came back because he couldn’t make do with his hand and his sanity.”

He reached around Jake and yanked open Jake’s fly in a couple rough pulling motions. Every one jerked Jake backwards, and he’d linger there, rubbing up against Sam’s prick and whining. The noise got to Sam, gritted his teeth. He grabbed the back of Jake’s waistband and hooked his fingers beneath it, beneath the elastic band beneath _that_ , and ripped the whole thing down. Jake sucked in a breath, choked on it and then let out what air he’d gotten in a long, low moan. Sam dug the heel of his hand into Jake’s buttock and forced it down.

“I’m not the one who thinks getting himself pounded early—” They’d knocked into the table a couple times with their feet. They still were knocking into it, making all kinds of crap rain down. No weapons—thank God, else something would have had bullet-holes in it by now—but napkins and keys and bottles…bottles.

It was the stupid floral-scented lotion Dean had tossed out of the bathroom earlier, cracking that there weren’t any girls on _this_ side, thank you. Sam maybe made the thin crappy plastic split when he popped off the top; anyway, something jagged sliced open his thumb. The blood warmed up the lotion a little. Not that Jake twisted and cursed any less once Sam had stabbed two fingers into him.

“—is gonna keep me from getting pounded by anything—anything else.” Jake’s ass was straining around Sam’s fingers, clamped so tight Sam couldn’t get past his second set of knuckles. But where Sam’s fingertips had gotten to, where they were, it was so hot and silky and so _easy_ to twist a little and make Jake go slack, graze against the sides and watch Jake twitch like a puppet.

“Fuck you,” Jake managed to say. Thin and high and breathy, more like a plea than anything else.

Sam snorted, corkscrewed out his fingers and licked at the back of Jake’s neck when that made him collapse. He jerked open his own fly, pulled his cock out past the little biting teeth of his zipper. “No, _I’m_ not the one getting fucked.”

Jake did his keening cursing crying out then, and not a second later when Sam was holding his ass up with one hand and sliding in so fast and easy, like that last one had been some kind of stick jacking him so damned open it made Sam’s eyes roll back into his head. Almost too open, but then Sam’s balls hit Jake’s ass, got cushioned so deep in them that Jake was going to have zipper marks later, and it tightened up. It tightened up and Jake dropped his head, not even moaning now, just raggedly breathing. And then Jake suddenly hitched and Sam was incredulous. Incredulous, then annoyed and finally amused.

“That’s not getting you off,” he snarled, and yeah, it was a stupid play on words but not when the sweat was so thick he could peel it off Jake’s skin with his teeth, not when he was sliding his hand over Jake’s shivering belly to the hip and then back. Not when he didn’t _care_ , not about anything that didn’t involve him wrapping his fingers around Jake’s thigh and yanking him backwards so he gasped and then just didn’t _breathe_. “You wanna get fucked, you’re getting fucked. You’re getting fucked through it till your dick’s back up and asking me and begging me and I don’t know, maybe I’ll feel—”

Fuck. Maybe Jake went off early but he recovered quick, knees wide and hips rolling back to Sam with every goddamned thrust till he had to be tasting Sam’s cock in his mouth. He was cursing, but it was all ‘please, fucking please, you fucking bastard now _please_ ’ so Sam let it ride. Sam let himself ride, not having to really do much now except bury himself in Jake’s stupid, sweet, stubborn sickness.

“—maybe I’ll feel—”

The pressure started in Sam’s knees, feet, hand—wherever he was touching the floor—and built fast, pushing up his stiffened muscles till they splintered away. It drummed into the backs of his eyes so his vision whitened, filled with dots and it crammed into the back of his throat so he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even choke.

“—feel like—”

He blew apart.

* * *

It still grated on Dean that Sam would ever need something that he had to get from an outsider, but that, he decided, was how the world fucked with you. Nothing could be done about it, so what mattered was what Sam needed to be okay. ‘cause when Sam was relatively on the level, he could be reasoned with—shut up, Dean could do that when he wanted to—and he could be talked out of doing idiotic things.

So really, Dean should’ve just stuck with his original idea. If it kept Sam’s head out of his ass…this was why Dean usually avoided thinking a lot about something. Second-guessing could screw with a mind like little else.

He checked his watch, then sighed. Maybe he’d try that Radisson first before he went back to the motel. He didn’t want a drink, or anything to eat considering the size of the pizza take-out box, but he could use being around people.

“Hey, how about somebody _I_ can take around?” he muttered to the sky.

* * *

“Oh, my God.” Though Sam had long since rolled off him, Jake was still lying there in pretty much the same position. The only thing he’d changed was to pull his arms down to by his head. “Fuck. There’s no way I’m walking now.”

He could always be dropped off, Sam idly thought with some reluctance. Sam pushed himself from his back to his side and took a good look at what he’d done.

Well…all right, there weren’t any desires to go out and conquer the world, strangely enough. Usually this was when he brushed up so close against that dark streak of survival and potential that had had the demon so interested in him that he had to spend the next few days recoiling from it. But right now, Sam was just really tired. And all right, kind of pleased at how messed-up and sweaty and boneless Jake looked, with jeans yanked down to there and dark red hand-shaped blotches angling up at his ass from his thigh and shirt tossed up over the jumpy muscles in his back.

He was _tired_ , he told his dick. “Why the hell would you settle for that?”

Jake blinked like it required a supreme effort from him. Then he dragged his head around and focused on Sam; dazed as he was, the hopeless resignation was already coming back. “You see anything better? It’s not like I can go back to a normal life.” He shrugged, looking away from Sam. “Look, if you wanna fuck me because I look like your brother and all that, fine. I’m not even going to ask.”

“I’m not your mom,” Sam had to say.

For a second, it looked like Jake might at least have the energy to raise himself. But then he just snorted and heaved himself over on his side to face Sam. “Now who’s got the dirty mind?” he weakly joked. “I don’t want you to be her. I want you to tell me she’s a crock of shit.”

“Thought you didn’t want people telling you things.” Sam glanced down at Jake’s stomach, where the shirt-flaps were stuck half-up with drying come.

“I thought about it some more,” Jake muttered. “And I don’t want people telling me shit. They barely ever know what to tell me. But you…um, you seem to have a pretty good idea.” Was he blushing? Did he have enough blood left in his head to blush? “I figure it’s fine if you’re doing it.”

“You really want to trust me that far?” First time Sam actually had gotten a look at Jake’s cock, come to think of it. He was curiously not embarrassed about making the most of it.

Jake shifted, not exactly uneasily. “What’s your problem that you can’t trust yourself?”

Well, it’d been a really long time since Sam had even tried. He didn’t even really remember how that worked. “I’ve got reasons, okay?”

“And I can argue,” Jake retorted.

Sam threw out his arm and ran one finger from Jake’s shoulder to the dip of his waist. Jake drew in a sharp breath and went very still. The finger kept going, dropping to tickle the underside of Jake’s cock and Jake shivered.

“Uh,” Jake said.

“This isn’t really that much about Dean now. And your mom’s a crock of shit,” Sam conversationally remarked. Oddly enough, he thought he might even be relaxed. He liked this feeling. A lot, actually.

The pupils of Jake’s eyes widened till the iris was a hair-fine green ring around them. “Okay.” He bit his lip. His hips started to rock a little. “Can we…bed…my knees…?”

Sam shrugged. “How much thinking do you want me to do right now?”

“Okay, never mind,” Jake said, crawling over. He didn’t seem to care that much, either.

* * *

_A Week Later, Give or Take a Couple_

Dean winced, then turned around and carefully walked backwards the last few yards to the car. He leaned himself against its side, feeling a slight pang in his spine as he did—goddamn it, the painkillers were wearing off—and put his hand on the car top. Thank God they were parked behind a big bush, he thought.

Then he slapped the car a couple times. Somebody cursed inside just before there was a loud thump, followed by several other clearly uncoordinated thumps. A few seconds later, the back-door on Dean’s side opened and Sam swung out his legs, looking up with an annoyed expression. His shirt-collar had been yanked sideways and his jaw was gleaming with spit.

“Did you even go into the place?” Dean asked. Like Sam had any right to be annoyed.

Sam started to answer, but got cut off by a manila file being shoved between him and Dean. Dean took the folder and Jake dropped back into the car, muttering something about needing his shoe.

“I just want to point out, I had to put up with this from you for years,” Sam finally said.

“Whatever, Sammy. I never tried it across from a church.” No damp spots that Dean could see, though the folder was kind of creased up and beaten around. He held it with his fingertips as he opened it up.

Snort from the peanut gallery.

“That was a Catholic girls’ school. It’s so not the same thing,” Dean muttered.

“Sure.” Sam clearly was humoring him. “So did the nice blonde tell you anything useful?”

“ _Clare_ gave me a gravesite, so shove it, bro. And also her number, so I don’t have to listen to you two in the bathroom tonight.” Dean sighed. “Man, the stuff I put up with for you…”

The folder was suddenly yanked from his hand. Then it thwapped him, and before he could retaliate, Sam was back in the car and climbing into shotgun. “Then let’s go. God forbid we keep you from getting laid…especially with how cranky you’ve been lately.”

Dean just…he couldn’t believe…that little _prick_.

Jake popped out his head. “Yeah, you could really use a night off. Unwind or something.”

He closed the door just before Dean would’ve kicked him in the head. Jackasses. Both of them. Like Dean was ever gonna try helping Sam out in that department again—regular sex was turning him into some freakish monster. He should kill Sam for that.

Not really. Because Sam was kind of happy now, and staying around…but Dean was going to kick them out of bed early this time. He wasn’t that generous.


End file.
